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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • I mean, when that xkcd was made, that was a hard task. Now identifying a bird in a picture can be done in realtime on a raspberry pi in a weekend project.

    The problem in the op isn’t really a limitation of AI, it’s coming up with an inventory management system that can detect low inventory without being obtrusive in a users life. The rest is just scraping local stores prices and compiling a list with some annealing algo that gets the best price to stops ratio.







  • Reminds me of a story about Jackson Pollock, don’t know if it really happened though or is just a joke.

    At a Jackson Pollock exhibition, there was a group of art connoisseurs discussing one of his paintings where it was all black and gray except for one little streak of red. They were going back and forth saying what they all thought he meant by it. Was it the futility of man staring into the void, was it that even in darkness there is always hope, etcetera.

    But then Jackson Pollock showed up and some one asked him and he told them, “Oh that? That happened when I was painting that one over there”




  • Yes they can track some moving objects and if it is currently on a collision course it will react, but not until the point where it’s clear that it is going to hit the thing. The car isn’t going to gauge the situation and identify that there may or may not be a situation in which it needs to act or not.

    For example, is an AI driver going to recognize an animal running in a fenced in yard as something it can ignore? What about when the animal is running in a trajectory that the car could see as an intersection in the future, but is otherwise prevented by the fence?

    Or another common occurrence, you are driving in the right lane of a street, and traffic gets backed up in the left lane so a person doesn’t look and just pulls into your lane. A good defensive driver would be slowing down a little and looking for any signs of someone trying to switch lanes. I guarantee an AI car would not identify the possibility until someone started making a move.

    For it to truly be AI, it needs to think in advance, sort of like the chess computers do. It needs to take the current and past states, and judge possible future states and weigh them. Then take the outcomes from that process, and integrate them into future decisions. That is true AI, a lot of the AI that exists is just this static chain of probabilitys that sprinkles some randomness on top to appear as if it’s different each time.


  • I think the argument is that for it to truly be AI, it would need to be able to react to new situations that it isn’t trained on.

    Like everything it does now is just picking the most likely thing out of the things it was trained on, but with no thought to the current situation.

    For example, AI powered self driving cars can’t really make decisions like, “hey there is a child playing with a ball on the side of the road, it’s not a threat, but I’d better pay attention to where that ball is going”. It will just not do anything until it is on a collision course and by that time, it may not have enough space to stop in time, because it also can’t really tell the condition of the roads.

    The AI as it exists right now basically only knows about the moment it is currently in and the moment it just left. It is not looking toward the future and thinking of possible outcomes and plans of action like we do. It doesn’t attempt to identify situations until they actually happen so while it can react faster than a human, humans can make it so they never have to react at all.





  • Especially in cities with bike lanes, and frequent bike traffic.

    Driving into Chicago is a nightmare for me when we go. Just getting into town and parking for the week, I feel so much anxiety looking out for bikers and trying to not be an asshole.

    But then once we are parked, it’s a week of bliss with all the public transit options.

    I already made up my mind that next time we go we are taking the Amtrak train from Toledo to Chicago and skipping the driving bullshit.



  • Everything should be glass or aluminum. Preferably aluminum since you don’t really have to worry about mixtures and cleaning it, you just melt it down and reshape it. With glass, you have to separate out the different types, and it still breaks down each recycle, I believe, since they mix silica with other compounds to make different kinds of glass.

    I honestly don’t understand stand why plastic beverage bottles are still a thing. Cans work perfectly. And if you insist on bottles, they can make aluminum cans too.


  • Maybe Im reading the vibe wrong but to me, it seems like when it comes to the programmer/sysadmin/poweruser side of Microsoft, they seem pretty good in terms of not being total shit. Their “normie” facing side though seems hella shady though. Things like ads in windows, the speculated subscription model for windows, office 365, one drive spam.

    For example, things like vscode, WSL, winget, power tools, the new console app, powershell, typescript, opening up .net to native cross platform. All these things are pretty sweet and seem like something they wouldn’t be interested in doing.

    It almost feels like there are two Microsofts right now and they are at odds with each other. So yeah, I guess enjoy it while it lasts, but always be ready to drop them like a sack of potatoes.


  • The theme of cyberpunk is that you have a literal anti corp terrorist in your head, and how that is affecting V’s psyche. Like there are points in the game where you choose some dialogue options and the game is like “is that V’s opinion or Johnny’s”.

    I think they should have not played up the “if left unchecked, he’s going to kill you” sense of urgency bit though. But basically every open world game has the same problem with how do you reconcile having an open world, but also have a plot that needs moved forward. Like they can’t just outright game over you if you just do side quests for a in-game week or so.

    That’s where starfield actually gets it right. You aren’t the “chosen one”, you are just a guy. The main plot of the game has no sense of urgency, because it’s fully driven by how much you dig into the artifact mystery. Any one in constellation could be doing the same things you are doing, and getting the powers and finding more artifacts, they all have seen the same visions you have when they first touched one. Again, you aren’t special.